Italy was the most important country where an ‘anti-fascist consensus’ was established after the Second World War, albeit at an official level. The adoption of universal suffrage, the creation of the Constituent Assembly and the drafting of the Constitution were participated in by all the forces involved in the antifascist liberation struggle. The anti-fascist struggle in Italy had also turned into a war of liberation with the occupying Nazi Germany and the establishment of the collaborationist ‘Salo Republic’.
“Albeit at the official level” we said. Although the Italian Communist Party (PCI), the main organization of the partisans who were the vanguard of the anti-fascist resistance, was included in this consensus, the regime in Italy was controlled by a party of order, with the Christian Democrats (DC) at its center, at the behest of the US and NATO. This party of order did not hesitate to use its striking power against the communists through Gladio and the mafia. The PCI, even though it did not seek power, was another country within the country, another society within Italian society. Its prestige was high due to its sacrifices in the resistance. It was organized within the working class. In the 1976 elections, it received 34.4 percent of the vote and caused considerable fear in the establishment.
This, roughly speaking, reflected the balance of forces in the Italian First Republic. In the 1980s, two important transformations began to take place: First, the Italian establishment shifted to a strategy of high interest rates and currency devaluation, with the plan of full integration into the European common market. This was a strategy with which we were very familiar: Under the guise of ‘competitiveness’, lowering labor costs, cutting consumption of working people, reducing access to credit for small producers, intensive financialization and a partial transfer of sovereignty to Brussels. The second and perhaps more surprising development was the rapid adaptation of the PCI to these austerity policies. Italian communism may have begun to poison itself earlier, but it meant that a critical threshold had been crossed. It is very telling that the PCI’s vote in the last elections in 1987, in which it participated as a party, fell to its lowest level in 20 years.
It meant that the balance of forces on which the First Republic had been based was overturned. With the end of the Cold War, the corruption, nepotism, state-mafioso collaboration of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), which was one of the wings of the party of order along with the DC, was being exposed. This period, known in our country as the ‘Clean Hands’ operation, marked the end of the First Republic in Italy and ushered in the ‘magistrate’ rule.
It was around this time, as the magistrate administration was running out of steam, an unknown boss announced that he would take the field to ‘fight communism’.
But was there communism left?
The PCI refashioned and renamed itself the Party of the Democratic Left (PDS). Considering the PDS reformist, the revolutionaries formed the Communist Refoundation Party. The latter group was also appreciated decently by former PCI voters. The 1993 local elections resulted in a decisive defeat for the DC and a partial victory for the PDS.
So Silvio Berlusconi began his fight against communism with the local election victory of the men of order in ties who were in fact whipping a dead horse. He declared the end of ‘party politics’ for Italy and said that the country would be governed by ‘completely new people’ in the new era. There was no more ‘popolo’ (people), there was ‘gente comune’ (ordinary people). The fate of Italy would no longer be decided by the people, but by the ‘free association of the electorate’. Against the ‘cartel of leftist forces’, he called for a ‘pole of freedom’ that would combine free enterprise and love of work with the family values of Catholic Italy.
Berlusconi was waging a war against the ‘traditional elites’ (i.e. those entrenched in the balance of power of the First Republic) and demanding an end to the Clean Hands operations.
Berlusconi challenged politics and politicians, arguing that only with a business spirit could the state become functional again.
It should not be surprising that the Lega, one of the critics of this ‘cumbersome state-business spirit’, today forms a coalition with Berlusconi’s party. It should also come as no surprise that a large proportion of DC voters in the First Republic voted for Forza Italia. After the electoral law was changed in 1993, there was a shift towards American-style two-party rule. Here Berlusconi took his place on the Italian political scene as the main element that carried the old DC mass base into the new era. In the Second Republic, where the mass base was marginalized and organizational politics was declared redundant, personalities came to the fore, and the figure of the leader who came into contact with the ‘electorate’ took the place of the man of the organization. The late Berlusconi was also working to establish this order. His media empire was the most important tool in creating a ‘charismatic’ figure. He would recreate the Italian right in his own image.
Contrary to what those who referred to him after his death as a ‘lover of national sovereignty’ might think, like all Italian parties in the 1990s and 2000s, he saw the EU as an external element that would ‘normalize’ Italy, as a tool that would free the state from sluggishness by forming fiscal discipline.
Together with his alliances with the Brothers of Italy and the Lega, he worked hard to establish an ‘anti-political’ right-wing discourse, now called the ‘post-fascist consensus’. His aphorism “Mussolini was not that bad dictator” describes this consensus well. The anti-fascist insurgents, the main engine of the First Republic, are now portrayed as just as brutal, cruel and violent as the fascists. Fascist shock troops and anti-fascist partisans deserve to be referred to together as ‘children of this land’. It is such a farce that the President of the Senate, Ignazio La Russa of the Brothers of Italy, who said that there was no anti-fascism in the Italian Constitution, was able to attend the ‘Liberation Day’ ceremonies a few days later. Even worse, the same Russa still has a bust of Mussolini in his house, an heirloom of his father.
It was unthinkable that this consensus, which had been reinforced by the PDS’s shift to the ‘center’, would not be shaken by the 2008 crisis. The first solution to this crisis was the domination of technocratic governments, adherence to Brussels and the mania for privatization. The technocratic governments imposed on Italy a wave of marketization that even Berlusconi at times hesitated to undertake. This period saw the disintegration of parties on the left and the right: The Democratic Party and Berlusconi were losing. Meanwhile, the mafioso leader was being investigated for corruption (a commonplace in Italian politics) and sidelined. By the 2018 general elections, the combined vote of the Democratic Party and Forza Italia did not even reach 33 percent. Henceforth, the 5 Star Movement (M5S) of comedian Beppe Grillo, an internet phenomenon, and the Lega, which took an ‘Italian nationalist’ position by trying to disassociate itself from the north, were at opposite ends of the political theatre. The M5S leader at the time, Luigi Di Maio, was not afraid to state the obvious: The Second Republic dominated by Berlusconi and the ‘center-left’ was dying.
That he is the symbol of the Second Republic should not mislead anyone. He always had friends in the First Republic too. Although he was never a member, he had very good relations with the PSI, the party of order of the first republic. With the collapse of the Second Republic, the fact that he managed to reinvent himself and throw himself into the right-wing coalition should be considered a success.
From now on, it seems inevitable that Forza Italia will be swallowed up by the other coalition partners. If the matter is charisma, Meloni and Salvini seem to have it all. Moreover, he seemed to have overcome his occasional polemics with Brussels: At the party congress, which he attended from his sickbed, he emphasized European unity against ‘Chinese imperialism’, differentiated his party from the likes of Marine Le Pen, and secured his place in the ‘center-right’ European People’s Party (EPP) in the European Parliament. This is the ‘legacy’ of the Second Republic and Berlusconi’s death: Christian Europe and Italian values, united by a free market spirit.
